From MN to Philly, cops, troops flood the zone, violate our rights - and make us less safe

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Tear-gassing apartments. Pepper-spraying journalists. Blocking a church. The American police state is fighting for its life in Brooklyn Center, and it's terrifying

The police, troops are violating our human rights and making us less safe. My new column

From MN to Philly, cops, troops flood the zone, violate our rights - and make us less safe | Will...
Raising a 'thin blue line' flag, pepper-spraying journalists and blockading a church, Brooklyn Center, MN, is Ground Zero for an American police state.
inquirer.com
11:22 AM · Apr 18, 2021

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/brooklyn-center-protests-police-arrest-journalists-20210418.html

After a veteran officer — also head of their police union — shot and killed a 20-year-old unarmed Black motorist named Daunte Wright during a traffic stop over expired tags and a dangling air freshener, you might think cops in Brooklyn Center, Minn., would have at least a brief moment of reflection, even contrition.

Yeah, right.

Instead, officers in the Minneapolis suburb — just 10 miles or so from the corner where Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of a dying George Floyd, sparking an American racial reckoning that apparently wasn’t — raised a version of the “thin blue line” flag over their embattled station house, which was their bold and outrageously arrogant signal that Brooklyn Center was about to become some kind of Alamo for racist, oppressive policing in America. It was their opening salvo in what has quickly devolved into a police riot.

Boosted by a massive presence of National Guard officers, state troopers, and even conservation cops who flooded the zone at the orders of Minnesota’s supposedly liberal Democratic governor, Tim Walz, soldiers and officers dressed in robocop gear thundered down suburban streets in military cruisers. They set early curfew hours for local residents determined to air their grievances no matter what, then fired tear gas and painful projectiles from behind a chain-link fence at anyone who wouldn’t go home. Predictably, the cycle of violence escalated, but the police response soon went far beyond the handful of lawbreakers to assault peaceful protesters — and those who just got in the way, including the kids in a nearby apartment complex gagging on tear gas.

Their “thin blue line” was especially brutal toward journalists seeking to exercise their 1st Amendment rights and document what police were doing in our name. Even after a federal judge in Minnesota took the extraordinary step of issuing a temporary restraining order telling state troopers (but, weirdly, not local cops or the National Guard) to stop arresting or dispersing working reporters and photographers, officers in Brooklyn Center have been wilding against the media — epitomized by the pepper-spraying of a French journalist in a yellow “PRESS” vest and her heavily equipped photographer.

*snip*